Mixed Marriages in Europe:
The Politics and Practices of Religious Plurality
Between the Fourteenth and Nineteenth CenturiesInternational Conference at the German Historical Institute in Rome, May
26-27, 2011Organizers: German Historical Institute Rome in cooperation with the
Royal Netherlands Institute Rome. Sponsored by the Gerda Henkel
Foundation.Organization and Contact: Dr. Cecilia Cristellon, cristellon@dhi-roma.it

Historical investigation into religious pluralism and multicultural
coexistence has until now paid little attention to the subject of mixed
marriages. Sources show that mixed marriages are documented from the
late Middle Ages as a common practice, although they were not
commonplace. In Europe the processes of confessionalization and nation
state formation made mixed marriage into a political issue. Different
types of authorities—ecclesiastical, state, local—both competed among
themselves for, and simply sought to establish, control over
interconfessional and interreligious marriages—alternately clashing,
negotiating, and compromising. In the early modern period, mixed
marriages helped to lay the foundations for religious coexistence and
tolerance and to negotiate interconfessional and interreligious
boundaries both internal (between Catholic, Protestant and Reformed, and
Jewish communities and regions) and external (with the Muslim world,
the East, and the New World).
This international conference—the first dedicated specifically to this
topic—will explore the potential of this new area of research. The
papers will address the following issues: the emergence of the various
systems of rules concerning mixed marriages; the institutions
responsible for regulating them and the intermixing of politics and
religion in this regulation; the political, social, and emotional
elements that played roles in the processes of negotiating and
overcoming religious and confessional boundaries; the many tensions
underlying mixed marriages—conversion, gender roles, raising children;
and the challenge of secularization.